>>>>> "fc" == Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> writes:

    fc> as a PDA. How good is battery life, suspend/resume support and
    fc> overall robustness with the Mobile Pro?

battery life is 1.5 hours with screen at max brightness, no more than
3 at the dimmest setting.  oh yeah, and you can only change the
brightness in WinCE.

There is no suspend/resume.  Someone put in this whole i386-based APM
emulation spaghetti monstrosity, which will suspend _the cpu only_.
It was surely a neat exercise for learning how to suspend a VR-series
MIPS, but it doesn't turn off the screen backlight, doesn't power down
PC cards, doesn't even sync the disk in case the battery runs out
while suspended.  so, it locks your CPU, but it doesn't actually save
any power.  Then someone else added this ``force-suspend'' feechur
that forces the machine into suspend when the woefully inaccurate
battery guage reads low (meaning only 1/3 of your battery is left, OH
NO!).  You can press the power button to un-suspend it, but then it'll
force-suspend itself again after about five seconds.  so here you are
pressing [power], type a few keys, press [power] again, type a few
keys, trying to shut down your machine cleanly before the power-hungry
suspend state eats up all your battery and loses your work.

Also, while I was excited to have a MobilePro & Microdrive for the
first year i owned it, eventually I came to the conclusion that
Microdrives and NetBSD are *INFURIATING*.  The thing spins up and down
CONSTANTLY.  It drove me nuts.  Often the machine will freeze while
it's spinning up.  and it's not like (1) you try to do something, (2)
drive has to spin up, (3) you wait.  That would be okay.  

It's more like (1) you're writing an email.  (2) you press the 'h' key
in 'the'.  (3) the drive has to spin up. (4) the machine freezes while
the drive spins up, so it doesn't see the ``key up'' event right away,
and software key repeat causes you to type 'thhhe foolish fox thought
the screen backlight was a silly afterthought'.  (5) as you move on to
the next sentence, you realize you have to type backspace.

so, in short, I loved this machine, then grew to hate it.  Don't get
me started on the joys of that @#$%#$ resistive touchscreen.  Also if
you want an alarm clock, won't you need a way the machine can wake
itself up from suspend at a specific time?

-- 
Le fascisme est la dictature ouverte de la bourgeoisie.
		-- Georg Dimitrov